Rigorous Honesty, in the search of recovery from gross obesity. Mainly opinion, not advice. Some speculation, some errors, some fiction.
Sugar, grain and processed products are not food. Omega 6 oil and dairy should be mainly avoided.

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Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Revised Intentional Overeating

What was intentional at the time may have encoded and is now part of us. We now have to overcome our nature. That is the essence of the real problem.

So is eating food that I like, intentional overeating? Liking food is part of the problem. So perhaps the stoics are right... Hunger should be the only sauce. Simple food is best. Barley portage. Barley cakes. But where can one get barley grown without fertilizer and chemicals? Oh well, in the end we just die anyway.

I expect that most obese people do not want to be obese but they want to eat well, like the food, enjoy life or perhaps cannot stop eating. They both know that they must reducing eating to lose weight. There is where the problem lies most of the time, and that is following that direction. The resistance to calorie reductions comes from hunger or a mental drive; of the mental drives there are at least three, physical or physiological memory, automatic memory, and conscious memory.

Any reduced calorie diet will take the weight off. Hunger is less if we keep insulin low, that is eat a higher fat, normal protein, low carbohydrate. Our body balances our need with fat taken from the reserves, so to our body any reducing diet is higher in fat to our body. We will experience hunger if we have been living on a high carbohydrate diet. It will take considerable time to adjust to a more Paleo like, Atkins like, low carb diet, but you may suffer if you do it quickly. Those carb that we eat should be slow carbs only, that is greens and a few cooked unprocessed vegetables, high in fiber and slow to digest.

Now those mental drives need to be addressed. These need to move to the conscious decision making area of the brain. That is where the difficulty is. We are not taught to unmake automatic behaviors, and we will always revert to our old automatic behaviors if we ever let vigilance slide or lapse. This vigilance must continue to death, and that will come soon enough. There is no need to hasten death by overeating.

There are many reasons that eating may have become automatic. These include liking food, environment, food addiction, emotional eating, stress, or trained in overeating. Many of these were trained in by parents, environment, conditions, rules or desires of self as children. Some of these only became a problem as our metabolism slowed with age, or with other body or chemical changes. But what do I know. We all die in the end.